Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni

This Land is My Land

Best Black & White Documentary work

Gomma Grant 2016 Best Black & White Documentary work.

"In the deep south of Italy's Puglia, in a region called Salento, a killer bacteria, the Xylella, is ravaging all the olive groves. What is happening in that green peninsula, paradise of beauty, goes far beyond the reported crop pest. Together with the secular trees, the disease is wiping out the heritage of an entire population, putting on its knees the economy of the common people. Memories start to fade, reduced to ashes along with the desiccated trees, burned to stop the contamination. The high-water of the modernization has long since begun the erosion process.

Peasants and farmers in the last 20 years have been seduced by a growing olive oil market paying for quantity over quality. Pesticides have been used, weed-killers to flatten the soil for a faster harvest of the olives. Rapacious entrepreneurs head of multinationals companies begun to tighten the noose over the peninsula.

Grandiose projects for touristic resorts, highways, intensive cultivations schemes were submitted to local institutions for approval and funding. Powerful interests were moved, easy gains for higher status people tickled. The big machine of globalization started to crush the history, mashing the legacy of generations of women and men who gave their lives for the beauty of this land.
" JmC-VP

This Land is My Land shot in Puglia, South Italy.Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni